Comments Sheet【FR1】
February 26, 2015
Title of the Project
Research Term
Societal Adaptation to Climate Change : Integrating Palaeoclimatological
Data with Historical and Archaeological Evidences
FR1
Project Leader
NAKATSUKA Takeshi
General advice and comments of the PEC:
The members of the PEC were generally quite satisfied with the progress over the past year, especially
in accumulating large amounts of data, including from isotope analysis, tree rings, archeological finds
and now also from historical documents. The welcome inclusion of English-speaking scholars was also
noted with approval. Further internationalization is still needed, including the incorporation of insights
from the international literature about the interface of climate and recorded history. Widening the scope
of the research to include the history of East Asia might also be considered.
The project is broadly organized into a strand of reconstructing past climate and a strand of relating
historical events to the documented climate variability. How will the divide between these two strands
be bridged? A methodological strategy for integration needs to be further articulated. What shared
outcomes can the paleoclimatologists and historians expect to result from the project? The presentation
often mentions “apparent correlations,” but it was suggested that it should be possible to move from
correlation to a probabilistic relationship. In order to establish a causal relationship, a conceptual model
needs to be developed that can derive hypotheses to be tested in statistical modeling.
The project has made a good start in documenting and analyzing technological change as a means of
adaptation to climate variability, but, as the analysis deepens, it should also be considered that
technological change is to some degree independent from climate variation. Accounting for other
factors, including volcanic activity, is also recommended.
Finally, the ultimate challenge of the project is how to frame the relevance of the research of the past for
the present and future. Can lessons be learned from the research that can help the world prepare for the
future? If so, who would need to be targeted in disseminating results?
Reply
We appreciate all valuable comments from the PEC. We will respond to all PEC
comments positively during FR Year 2 as follows.
1) Enhancement of international interactions.
Members of the RIHN project office, including humanities experts, are now reading
IHOPE relevant papers routinely and preparing papers for submission to international
conferences and/or high-rank international journals. The project research area will be
partly enlarged to East Asia so that macro-level historical societal reactions to climate
change in Asia can be compared between Japan and China, two main Asian countries
with completely different geopolitical situations.
2) Linkage between paleoclimatology and study on climate-society relationship
We will launch a new research group, consisting of members in the RIHN project office
and some early modern economists, to promote statistical analyses on societal responses
against climate variations using conceptual models on climate-society cause-and-effect
relationships. Apparent coincidence between famine, warfare and climate variation are
now being confirmed statistically using huge numbers of medieval and early modern
documentary records on climate disasters in Japan.
3) Other factors than climate change to explain societal innovations.
Because most of historians and archaeologists in our project have had their own ideas on
causes of the innovations, we believe that we cannot miss the important other factors
than climate to explain the societal innovation.
4) How to utilize project results for the present and future world.
Most of past societies suffered from large multi-decadal climate variations and often
failed to adapt to them, but they sometimes overcome the difficulties. Because the
“multi-decadal curse” is distributed universally among many environmental problems, we
think that historical wisdoms to overcome the multi-decadal variability can be shared by
present and future people who must adapt to world with changing environments. So, the
target people of the project results are all people with political will in the world.